What Is Cloud Computing?

Using a public cloud is about using other people’s servers to run your digital workloads.

In a sense, there’s no significant difference between running a software application on servers hosted in your own office versus locating it within Amazon’s infrastructure. In both cases, you need to make sure you’ve got sufficient compute, memory, network, and storage resources. In both cases, fast deployments and avoiding over-provisioning are key goals.

But, particularly when it comes to the largest cloud providers, there are important differences. You see, the sheer size of a platform like AWS (and right now there’s no platform on Earth that’s bigger) means it can offer you service, cost, and reliability performance that you could probably never hope to re-create on your own.

Let’s see how some of that works.

Highly Available and Scalable Resources

There’s an awful lot a successful company like AWS can get done...